Tony Harrison: Mother of the Muses

Allusion to Classical figure Memory (Mnemosyne), Prometheus, Aeschylus.

Relationship to Classical text Meditation on memory and ageing taking as its starting point his own forgetfulness of lines from Prometheus Bound.

Close translation of words/phrases/excerpts ‘Mother of the Muses’ translates μουσομήτορ᾽ (Aeschylus Prometheus Bound, l.461)

Classical/post-Classical intertexts Harrison recalls a museum visit and seeing lines from Prometheus Bound scratched onto a pottery sherd. He imagines the boy in Ancient Greece who perhaps inscribed them as a memory aid. The scene foregrounds the opening of his own film-poem Prometheus (1998), in which the son of a coal miner is seen memorising lines from the play.

Comment Dedicated to the memory of Emmanuel Stratas, his wife’s father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in 1987.